No More Pay Phones

Where have all the pay phones gone? Wherever they have gone, they’re not around any more. Used to be you could find a pay phone outside pretty much any supermarket or gas station, plus shopping malls, busy street corners. They’re all gone now. Trust me, I’ve looked. I know I’m not the last person on earth without a cell phone, but I sure feel like it when I’m searching for a way to get in touch. It’s a fucking travesty that they don’t have pay phones at gas stations any more. I mean seriously, WTF?

I was ‘over the hill’ today, walking, driving around, searching for a pay phone to use, for like half an hour. I finally got desperate and went inside a Chevron gas station and asked to use their telephone. Which they don’t allow apparently, even if you are a desperate mother almost in tears, towing two young children. They told me ‘we don’t have a phone’. The hell you don’t, but fine, that’s your story and you’re stickin’ to it. So, I went home without making my phone call. And maybe it’s just as well, I’ll don’t know….

Thank goodness [town where I live and town closest to where I live] still have intact pay phones from which a cell-phoneless person can actually make a phone call any hour of the day, for a mere two quarters… I know it’s a long shot, but I hope those pay phones somehow make love and propagate and send forth their spawn into the vast payphoneless void someday.

Update: I did finally break down and get a cell phone, in large part because of the sad absence of pay phones.